Circuit reestablishment and tear down in a highly available communications system

Abstract

A highly available communications system capable of circuit reestablishment and tear-down without manual intervention. The communications system includes a plurality of nodes interconnected by a plurality of communications paths to form at least one communications network. The nodes forward control packets on the network by way of a signaling protocol employing an out-of-band control technique. At least a portion of the nodes comprises a software configuration including a topology manager and a protocol manager. The protocol manager is operative to determine whether a control path is operational and whether a data transmission channel along a corresponding data path is established. In the event the control path is not operational, the protocol manager maintains the data transmission channel along the data path so long as the channel is established. The topology manager is operative to acquire network topology data, and the protocol manager is further operative to receive the topology data, deduce network topology changes therefrom, and reestablish and tear-down communications paths interconnecting the nodes based at least in part on the deduced topology changes.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONSN / ASTATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENTN / ABACKGROUND OF THE INVENTIONThe present invention relates generally to communications systems, and more specifically to a highly available communications system capable of circuit reestablishment and tear-down without manual intervention.A conventional communications system includes a plurality of nodes interconnected by at least one communications circuit or path to form a network. For example, each node may comprise a computer system or some other device such as a router or switch. Each router included in the communications system is typically configured to forward communications packets to at least one neighboring node on the network by receiving a packet at one of its input ports, determining the destination address by examining information in the header field of the packet, and sending the packet to the appropriate output port. Each router typically forwards packets by way...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

A highly available communications system is provided that is capable of circuit reestablishment and tear-down without manual intervention. The communications system includes a plurality of nodes interconnected by a plurality of communications circuits or paths to form at least one network. In a preferred embodiment, the network is a Multiple Protocol Label Switching based network having a ring topology for high bandwidth. The plurality of nodes includes at least one ingress node originating a communications path and at least one egress node terminating a communications path, and at least a portion of the plurality of nodes is configured to forward communications packets (e.g., control packets and data packets) to respective neighboring nodes on the network. The nodes may forward packets by way of “hop-to-hop” routing or explicit routing. The nodes forward control packets on the network by way of a signaling protocol employing an out-of-band control technique. Each node configured to forward packets is connected to at least one other node on the network by at least one control path and at least one data path. The data paths interconnecting the nodes transfer data packets between at least one source node and at least one destination node on the network, and the control paths transfer control packets between the nodes including messages for programming and maintaining the data paths. The signaling protocol may be a connection-oriented protocol or a connectionless protocol. In a preferred embodiment, the signaling protocol is the connectionless Resource Reservation Protocol.

Problems solved by technology

In this case, the communications paths cannot be recovered and must be torn-down and their associated resources released.

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